Friday, March 07, 2014

Rice and Rituals

Condoleeza Rice is supposed to give the commencement address at Rutgers University, but it's not going well for the folks at Rutgers who came up with the idea -- the "community" is organizing against her, claiming that Rice lacks "moral authority," or something. Juan Williams points out the obvious, yet again:

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.

Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.

Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

Carson would be Ben Carson, who is becoming persona non grata at Johns Hopkins because he's not so keen on Obamacare, among other things, even though he'd been head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.

It's not that shocking, actually, and I suspect that Williams knows it. We have our own commissars right here in River City, too. Williams asks a plaintive rhetorical question:

This shunning of Rice is especially troubling coming from a great American university. This is the place where debate and dissenting views are to be valued as sacred.

Rutgers’s own university mission statement says that one of its goals is to produce students who perform “public service in support of the needs of the citizens of the state and its local, county, and state governments.”

How is the public served by muzzling one of the most thoughtful, accomplished and respected political voices of her time just because she happens to be a Republican?

How is the public served? Well, having the reigning orthodoxy enforced is always a public service, because the orthodoxy is never wrong, at least as long as you're in agreement with it. And places like Rutgers and Johns Hopkins perform these rituals for precisely the same reason that the Romans would do crucifixions on the highway or in other public places -- you need to make sure that people see first hand what happens to dissenters.

Our universities have become hotbeds of intolerance and indoctrination. Opposing views not only are not welcome, they are squashed and silenced. This is just the latest example. How much longer will these government sponsored, bastions of hypocrisy be allowed to maintain the status quote of intolerance?

Yep, no place in the intolerant academy for Dr. Rice, who has to settle for a plum professorship at (arguably) the most prestigious university west of the Hudson.

No place? Didn't say that, of course. I don't know about the Hudson River, but she seems unwelcome on the banks of the Raritan River, however.

Would you argue that Dr. Rice is beyond the pale? I'm genuinely curious. And would you say that Ben Carson should be beyond the pale at Johns Hopkins, especially given that his many years of service to the institution?

Beyond the pale? No...she's clearly got a resume that makes her a good get for any commencement ceremony. But since that resume includes a few hundred thousand dead Ieaqis, I might prefer to hear from someone else.

Brian, I'm not too interested in "playing the race card," but every once in awhile, I figure that a left leaning person is interested in what is true as opposed to the brute exercise of power (which is all the race card is about.) Am I wrong about you?